Fresh-faced and spontaneous, Kalki Koechlin is known for bringing a certain degree of panache to the roles she portrays, unconventional as they are.
Born to French parents, the Indian actress says the more successful you are the more criticism you face. “The amount of criticism you get is directly proportional to how successful you are, especially as a woman,” Koechlin says.
Asked about her views on the brickbats faced by Bollywood actresses Deepika Padukone and Priyanka Chopra who have made it big in the West, the Dev D actress lauded the duo for handling disapprovals “sensibly.”
“I think they should be very proud of themselves. They are doing incredible work. I have seen Deepika grow so much since she first came in the industry. Priyanka is killing it all over the world. They are confident enough to handle it sensibly,” the actress observed.
When it comes to her, the vivacious National Award winner prefers to “ignore” Internet criticism but takes note of remarks from her loved ones.
“Internet criticism... I don’t handle. I ignore it. I don’t read it. I don’t respond. If I am getting very highly criticised I go off social media for a while. What’s important for me is criticism from family and friends... they know that I have certain weaknesses or they recognise... that’s a very Kalki thing to do. They know you,” she said.
So what are those typical “Kalki things” one might spot?
“The way I laugh...I have a very funny laugh that’s not a very natural laugh,” the 33-year-old said with an embarrassed smile.
Elated with the rave reviews garnered by her latest outing A Death in The Gunj, Kalki says she would love to do a biopic on Scots-Irish social worker Sister Nivedita as well as go for an action hero film.
“There are many, many roles that I would love to do. I love reading her (Sister Nivedita) and my mom has a lot of her books so I grew up reading her. I would love to do a historical film on that and I would love to do a biopic. I would also love to do an action hero kind of film. I just saw Wonder Woman... why don’t we have chicks who can do that here,” she wondered.
Any Hollywood dreams for the Margarita, With A Straw star?
“If (filmmaker Steven) Spielberg calls me then I would not be checking my calendar,” Kalki offers with a laugh.
On a sombre note, she says the transition has to be organic.
“I am not going to drop everything to try and have a career there. I think it has to happen organically. So if a good opportunity came by, why not,” she said.
A force to reckon with both onscreen (films like Shaitan, That Girl In Yellow Boots, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara) and on stage (currently seen in Rajat Kapoor’s stage adaptation of Macbeth), Kalki, also a writer, believes a good theatre actor is not necessarily good in films.
“You can’t do the same thing for both. If you are a good theatre actor, it doesn’t mean you are a good film actor and vice versa. There are very different methods of acting. In theatre, you are reaching out to the last person in the audience, while film is much more real... the camera is right there (in front of you),” she said. — IANS




Salma makes a meal of Beatriz at Dinner


By Gary Thompson




Think of that rule you have in place to prevent politics from being discussed at Thanksgiving dinner.
Now imagine that dinner without it.
This gives you some idea of what to expect in the engaging friction-fest Beatriz at Dinner, a movie that imagines what might happen if estranged factions of the larger American family had a frank airing of views.
In Beatriz at Dinner, this occurs when half a dozen California plutocrats gather in one of their showcase homes to celebrate a business success. A lone representative of the 99 percent, Mexican American massage therapist Beatriz (Salma Hayek), ends up in their midst.
She arrives to give a pregame rubdown to Cathy (Connie Britton) who’s hosting the dinner party for her husband (David Warshowsky) and his associates. Beatriz has a history with the family — she works for a hospital that specialises in alternative medicine and has nursed the family’s cancer-stricken daughter back to health. When Beatriz’s beater of a car breaks down, Cathy invites her to stay — the sort of magnanimous gesture a woman of her class might make. It’s an acknowledgment that Beatriz is “a member of the family,” but also a way for Cathy to signal her broad-mindedness, to acknowledge class difference, and to advertise her willingness to transcend it.
And there’s no apparent downside. Tiny, meek Beatriz poses no real threat to the self-congratulatory tone of the event, or so Cathy assumes.
Director Miguel Arteta has fun composing shots that show Beatriz literally marginalised — positioning her on the edge of the frame, where she is often mistaken by guests for the help. Beatriz weathers this with practiced aplomb, but quaffs anxiously, perhaps feeding her growing assertiveness.
The script by Arteta and Mike White is socioeconomically astute, attuned to the language of 1-percentres, their biases, the way they are both aware and unaware of them (some echoes here of Get Out).
The more Beatriz drinks, the more she wants to puncture the air of self-satisfaction at the table. She is particularly put off by the alpha male billionaire who ends up hogging the spotlight — a real estate developer (John Lithgow) and big-game hunter.
There are probably a few too many cues that encourage us to read this character as Trumplike, but the class issues in play are interesting, as is the movie’s suggestion that there is something capricious in the way we value (and compensate) people — a healer of the sick, a builder of shopping malls. The citing of shopping malls is surely a targeted detail — those same malls are closing all over America, as capital continues its relentless march to the next new thing, leaving behind the ruin and wreckage of the obsolete.
Beatriz at Dinner, until an imperfect and out-of-character ending, serves up some tasty cross talk, and a memorable performance by Hayek in the lead. —The Philadelphia Inquirer/TNS


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